Battle of the Sexes

Why Women Still Don’t Get It

Christopher Hitchens’s “Why Women Aren’t Funny” engendered plenty of outrage. He’s read the angry letters, seen the Funny Girls cover, and unearthed a romantic subtext in Alessandra Stanley’s counter-argument. To this unrepentant male, it all proves one thing: he was right all along.

As I read Alessandra Stanley’s essay in the April issue of Vanity Fair (“Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?”), the decades fell away from me, and I was back a quarter-century ago in the Washington, D.C., of the early Reagan years. In those days of my journalistic boyhood, there were three brilliant and witty young female reporters who drew all eyes to their prose and indeed to themselves. The flame-haired Maureen Dowd, the lithe and lissome brunette Jane Mayer (then at The Wall Street Journal), and the quasi-legally blonde Alessandra Stanley were the ones. They were a team, even though they were rivals, and would hang out together and occasionally invite some males along. I remember having lunch with all three of them at the now defunct Joe and Mo’s on Connecticut Avenue: it was a transgressive snack that felt somehow like breaking bread with the witches of Eastwick.

I could scarcely avoid asking myself if perhaps I stirred anything at all in these divine breasts. With Maureen and Jane it seemed improbable, but every now and then I caught myself wondering if the tempestuous Alessandra felt even a slight tendresse. Perhaps a hint in that demure glance, a suggestion in that tinkling laugh … Ah, even now it takes the droop out of my whiskers to reminisce about it. But I feared to speak, and duly danced at her wedding to another, while wearing the mask and banking down the smoldering fires within. Then she moved away, and ever upward on a parabola of achievement, and I was left to grow gray and reflective.

Alessandra Stanley. Photograph by Gasper Tringale.

And now, what a pulse is beating under my leathery old hide! Oh joy! She did care all along. Perhaps—oh heaven—she still does! “Look first upon this picture, and on this … ” Here are quotations from my original essay (“Why Women Aren’t Funny,” January 2007), followed by the relevant excerpts from hers:

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way [by being funny]. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift. [C.H.]

“Maybe pretty women were always funny but only now decided to go into comedy,” argues Patricia Marx … “Maybe pretty women weren’t funny before because they had no reason to be funny,” she says. “There was no point to it—people already liked you.” [A.S.]

[Nora] Ephron … accuse[d] me of plagiarizing a rant by Jerry Lewis that said much the same thing. (I have only once seen Lewis in action, in The King of Comedy, where it was really Sandra Bernhard who was funny.) [C.H.]

By the late 19th century the humorlessness of women was a staple of club toasts and magazines such as Punch. Jerry Lewis picked it up again in earnest in 2000, telling an audience at a comedy festival, “I don’t like any female comedians.”… And the question was recently reopened in this magazine: the polymorphously polemic Christopher Hitchens argued that, in general, women are not funny. [A.S.]

In any case, my argument doesn’t say that there are no decent women comedians. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don’t dig her shtick to suck her dick—know what I am saying? [C.H.]

By and large, however, stand-up comedy is tougher and meaner, and the women who do it play by men’s rules. [A.S.]

You may well wonder what people were thinking before that realization [about the necessity for male insemination] hit, but we do know of a society in Melanesia where the connection was not made until quite recently. I suppose that the reasoning went: everybody does that thing the entire time, there being little else to do, but not every woman becomes pregnant. [C.H.]

It’s a shame that Margaret Mead never made it to that tribe in Papua New Guinea where women tell the jokes, and men pretend to find them funny. [A.S.]

Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit. [C.H.]

Certainly, the rewards of wit are not nearly as ample for women as for men, and sometimes funny women are actually penalized. Not everything has changed since 1885, when educator Kate Sanborn tried to refute the conventional male wisdom in her book The Wit of Women. Sanborn pointed out that women have good reason to keep their one-liners to themselves. “No man likes to have his story capped by a better and fresher from a lady’s lips,” she wrote. “What woman does not risk being called sarcastic and hateful if she throws the merry dart or engages in a little sharp-shooting. No, no, it’s dangerous—if not fatal.” [A.S.]

For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle. [C.H.]

The humor of women has been a sensitive topic ever since the first one cracked a joke. (In Genesis, Sarah, pregnant long past her childbearing years, says her son is named Isaac, Hebrew for “laughter” … ) [A.S.]

I rest my case. By the way, Jewish humor seems to me to have been improving since the time of the mythical (but obviously fall-about and general thigh-slapper) Sarah, whose son was to be offered for sacrifice by her somewhat unsmiling husband. And what if I had claimed in those days of legend that Jews weren’t funny? There would have been an angry and resentful silence for a few millennia, followed by a chorus of triumphant accusations. “Milton Berle? Mort Sahl? Lenny Bruce? Woody Allen? How much funnier can you get? What, you have a problem with hilarious Semites?” At the close of my original article, I quoted my wife—whose tribal provenance is none of your business—as saying that “women get funnier as they get older.” My own personal riposte to this was: “Excuse me, isn’t that rather a long time to have to wait?” But Sarah, or Mrs. Abraham, as I prefer to think of her, was pushing 90 when she finally got off the snappy line that knocked ’em dead in old Hebron and that still appeals so much to Alessandra.

So, to return to the breathless, tremulous point with which I began: Can Alessandra be serious? Or is all of this a coded message to show me that, yes, I was right to hope, and right to dare to hope? I mean to say, I write a little feuilleton that’s published in Vanity Fair in the snows of last January, which argues that there are lots of sexy and aggressive chicks on the comedy circuit but stipulates that they are in a male game run by male rules, and which further cites Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz and praises Sandra Bernhard. And then the snows of this new January are just melting, and my seasonal affective disorder is just kicking in, when the molten, tawny Alessandra comes up with a piece that—never mind the careful way that she pads so lovingly in the deep tracks of my points above—also follows the fragrant and maddening spoor of the Jews and dykes and sex bombs, from Nora to Fran to Sandra and even into pastures and postures new. What am I saying: I rest my case? I can know no rest! I dash the beads of perspiration from my brow. I accept. I surrender. Oh Alessandra, oh angel, if you wanted a giggle or even a cackle, you only had to call me. Let’s agree that sexy and beautiful women are now trying even harder to please, and that a crafty Vanity Fair has furnished you with the photographs to prove it? Did I never tell you that this was my Plan A, and was my deepest-laid scheme all along? I forgive you for being so slow to see my little joke because—ah well, just because.